This backstage presidential drama was a combination of highly researched realism – viewers learned precisely how to appoint a new justice to the Supreme Court or assassinate a foreign potentate – and liberal fantasy: Martin Sheen's wise, articulate, Nobel prize-winning Jed Bartlet served as consolation to moderate Americans during the Dubya years. Striking for its prescience – Bartlet is eventually succeeded by a non-white president modelled on the then little-known Senator Obama from Illinois – it demonstrated what can come from trusting a writer-creator's vision: in this case, Aaron Sorkin. The episode Two Cathedrals combines dizzying moral and psychological complexities with monologues addressed to God in untranslated Latin to constitute one of the boldest episodes in TV history. Sadly, no UK attempt to replicate The West Wing has succeeded, largely because the British prefer their fictional politicians laughable or nasty (Yes, Prime Minister, The Thick of It) rather than decenct and serious. ML

Even now, the idea of David Lynch ­being allowed anywhere near network television seems like an impossible dream – but his show became a global hit. At first it seemed like he'd reframed the melodrama of the Who Shot JR? storyline in Dallas as the murder of a small-town prom queen. But it was like watching someone hallucinate about a soap opera, floating in a nether-world of Americana between the 1950s and the 90s. Will there ever be scenes on TV as baffling and as thrilling as Agent Cooper's visits to the Red Room, with enigmatic clues pouring out of a backwards-talking dwarf? Or a ­marginal character as much-loved and discussed as the Log Lady? Or a script that could flip ­effortlessly from eulogising simple pleasures (damn fine coffee and a slice of pie) to the ­unrepenting terror of killer Bob's ­howling face? RV

It still feels wonderfully bold and shocking. Yes, Britain's attitude to sexuality may have progressed, but in the current paranoid TV climate it's tough to envisage episode one of this intoxicating series being greenlit. As Stuart, Vince and Nathan drain the maximum joy possible from Manchester's Canal Street district – involving class As, rimming, underage sex and a jaunt to the maternity wing to visit the baby Stuart has fathered with lesbians – it's tough to choose which segment of the potential audience would die of offence first rather than simply switch off. QAF is big, beautiful and fast, its characters painted with broad brushes rather than dainty dabs. Russell T ­Davies ­created a show for gay men to laugh at and feel included by that was daring and addictive enough to ensnare anyone who simply loved good TV. GD

Though regularly described by critics as the greatest television series ever made, David Simon's epic dissection of Baltimore society struggled for ­ratings. This suggests that it is praised and watched by people who don't generally like television, but The Wire matters because it challenged one of the medium's most fundamental ­assumptions. In recent decades, the consensus among drama-makers was that TV's natural bedmate was cinema. A few visionaries, though, had always insisted that small-screen drama's twin was print fiction – and Simon brought this idea to triumphal fruition with a series which is, in effect, a five-decker novel exploring successively the cops, docks, politicians, schools and ­newspapers of a single city. Simon hired novelists as screenwriters and this strategy – combined with an indulgence from HBO to ignore traditional TV rules on the immediate comprehensibility of plots and dialogue – created a drama with a depth and complexity which few novels, never mind TV series, have achieved. ML

It shouldn't work at all. The central characters, the Fisher family, run a funeral home. Every episode starts with a death. They hold conversations with the deceased. It is, in short, a clattering bag of terrible ideas. In Alan Ball's hands it becomes a magnificent, bull-headed beast, tossing taboos on its horns as it goes. Death is real, life is messy, conflicts are frequently irreconcilable, sex is only rarely meaningful. It embraced the fact that, in life and death, people are complicated and only become more so as you get to know them. It should go in the pantheon of greats for creating Brenda Chenowith (played by Rachel Griffiths) alone – the single most richly drawn, beautifully nuanced, bewitching, ­frustrating, ­fabulous female character in modern television. Genius. LM

A literate romantic dramedy that owed as much to Straw Dogs as it did to Four Weddings and a Funeral, Simon Nye's ode to love, mud and internecine ­eccentricity ran for two wonderfully idiosyncratic series. Dylan Moran and Four Weddings's Charlotte Coleman were perfectly cast as Ian and Lisa ­Lyons – shambolic newlyweds whose relocation to her parents' isolated ­village would place them in a fogbank of rhubarbing yokelism and unaccountable familial hostility. Trapped in Camberwick Black, their disarmingly steadfast relationship served as a surprisingly tender counterpoint to the snowballing unpleasantness of their new life. The series provided a bittersweet epitaph for the wonderful Coleman, whose horribly premature death in 2001 ensured it was left to the viewer's imagination as to whether the Lyonses would ever escape their exquisite rustic nightmare. SD

As in the previous BBC John Le Carré adaptation (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) George Smiley is called out of retirement to take on an intangible Soviet foe. It's another labyrinthine thriller, dark and unrelenting, heavy on jargon, with an infernally complicated plot. There are double agents, triple agents – every character has at least two names. This cold-war world is a murky one, where good and evil are indistinguishable in the gloom. And once again it's Alec Guinness's extraordinary performance as Smiley that carries it. He has a presence that is both morose and dignified, and is totally bewitching. It's interesting to compare it with ­today's Spooks – which is so much fizzier and sexier but fails to capture a time as Smiley's People did with cold-war ­mistrust. I also suspect Smiley's ­People has more grounding in MI6 reality. Maybe I know it has . . . SW

As Francis Urqhart, Ian Richardson ­flattered us into rooting for the ultimate evil Tory. His asides to camera – in cabs, walking through the Commons corridors, or while he was in the loo – justified his chilling logic with the consummate skill of a natural politician, often delivered with the ultimate line in dissembling: "You might very well think that, I could not possibly comment." A story revolving around a Conservative power struggle, it was also the beneficiary of immaculate timing – being transmitted just after Thatcher had walked out of No 10. In the wake of that bombshell, it was almost believable that a shadowy Tory grandee like Urqhart could be stalking the shadows, plotting murders, shafting everyone around him in a vicious landgrab for the top job. Even his initials (FU) suggested his immaculate contempt for anyone who wasn't useful to him. RV

In DCI Jane Tennison, Lynda La Plante created the ultimate anti-heroine: resilient, intelligent and flawed by an addiction to booze and awkwardness in love, yet all the stronger for this. The first Prime Suspect was bluntly feminist: Jane had to beg to be in charge. "Let one have its own murder case, they'll all be wanting one," spluttered her boss. Before any torture-murderers could be convicted, Tennison had the seemingly more vital job of earning respect from a gang of jaded CID men. In later series, Tennison tackled child prostitution, war criminals and gruesome murders, surrounded in the ­midnight hours at her desk by pictures of severed limbs and stab wounds, cigarette smoke blasting from the corner of her haughty mouth. Her work/life balance was an omnipresent story and "having it all" was shown mostly to be a farce — her "support network" following her father's death was another file of corpse shots and a large bottle of scotch. Bleak, brutal and beautifully rendered, this was British crime drama at its absolute best. GD

Based on former doctor-turned-writer Jed Mercurio's book, this ran for two pulverising series and painted a truer and more terrifying picture of the NHS than we had ever seen before – or have seen since. Medical misdiagnoses? Fact of life. Arrogant and incompetent doctors? Strewn with a liberal hand through every department and protected by the system at every turn. ­Idealism and professional ethics? Choked by lack of funds – compromised care costs so much less – and crushed under the weight of internal, pettifogging bureaucracy. Written with evident and merciless rage, it showed a health ­system holed perilously close to the waterline, kept afloat only by ­beleaguered nurses and younger doctors not yet quite exhausted by the effort. It even coaxed a barnstorming performance out of Max Beesley. LM